“I’m grateful that they gave me a shot to come here,” said Bernard Anderson, a mixer at Greyston. “[When I] came here,” Anderson said, “I stopped going to jail.”

He and other employees who have flourished at Greyston tell its story in a documentary recently co-produced by Gabelli School of Business professor Michael Pirson, Ph.D. It’s the latest outgrowth of research by him and his colleagues about how businesses can succeed by tuning in to their employees’ humanity.

Addressing the Great Resignation

Key to this approach is promoting employees’ dignity, according to an Oct. 30 Harvard Business Review article co-authored by Pirson, Gabelli School professor Ayse Yemiscigil, Ph.D., and Donna Hicks, Ph.D., an associate at Harvard’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs.

The article describes how to lead an organization with dignity—by defining it clearly, recognizing people’s inherent value, and acknowledging dignity violations, among other things. The goal is creating workspaces “where people feel seen and heard, and where they can collaborate at the next level” because of it, said Pirson, the James A. F. Stoner Endowed Chair in Global Sustainability at the Gabelli School.

Yemiscigil said it’s an urgent topic because of the so-called Great Resignation and “the epidemic of low employee engagement.”

“There are all sorts of indicators showing that the way that we manage and lead organizations is not working for the majority of people,” she said.

Creating a dignity culture, Pirson and Yemiscigil said, involves such things as listening to understand people, acknowledging employees as whole human beings, and giving employees a greater voice in the organization. “It doesn’t take long” for this culture to take hold if there’s enough intention and commitment, Pirson said.

Inspired by Sesame Street

Helping companies make this shift is the idea behind the documentaries Pirson started co-producing about four years ago after he happened to meet some of the (human) cast members of Sesame Street through a Gabelli School connection. Inspired by the show’s emphasis on human potential, he set out to feature companies that exemplify humanistic management, working with co-producer Alison Bartlett, a writer, director, and Emmy-nominated actress who was a Sesame Street cast member.

His second short film, Zen Brownie, focuses on Greyston Bakery, a supplier of Ben & Jerry’s founded in 1982 by Bernie Glassman, a physicist and Buddhist monk. (One of Glassman’s friends, Oscar-winning actor Jeff Bridges, narrates.) The bakery’s dignity-based open hiring policy creates “a virtuous cycle of trustworthiness,” Pirson says in the film. “Trust that you place in other people typically gets trust back” and often inspires the recipient to want to live up to that, he says.

Studying Student Behavior

His team has shown the documentaries at film festivals; they’re looking for a distributor and planning a few more films. He and Yemiscigil are also working on studies, soon to be submitted to the Journal of Business Ethics, that show how dignity can boost employees’ motivation and engagement as well as teams’ performance. Some of their findings come from a study of 800 Gabelli School students preparing for a consulting competition, working in teams.

Dignity is important not only for companies but for society because it frees us to think more about large-scale problems, Pirson said, giving climate change as an example.

Without “dignity wounds” occupying our minds, he said, “we move from a defensiveness into a space of abundance where we can create, and that is what’s necessary for our species to actually survive.”

That’s according to a study co-authored by Fordham economics professor Sophie Mitra, Ph.D., and researchers in health-related fields at other universities. It shows that after four decades in which inflation stayed low and didn’t pose a serious problem in America, the mental health impacts of its spike in the past few years are ripe for study, Mitra said.

“That’s an open field in terms of research,” she said. “We know … that unemployment has very detrimental effects on mental health, and that a job loss can lead to depression and other negative mental health outcomes.” Inflation has received less study, but seems to be “a very important potential determinant of well-being, including mental health,” she said.

The study also suggests that positive economic news, like a low unemployment rate, may be “insufficient in terms of telling us about how people feel about the economy,” she said.

The High Price of Milk

The study, based on data about 71,000 working-age adults, was published earlier this year in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. The researchers used information from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey, begun during the coronavirus pandemic, which collects data about how households are affected by various social and economic issues.

Their study focused on respondents who told the Census Bureau about their stress level caused by price increases. It compared these stress levels in mid-September 2022, when the inflation rate was 8.2%, with levels in June 2023, when inflation had dropped to the closer-to-normal rate of 3%. Despite the decline, the share of respondents who were very or moderately stressed by inflation increased, going from 77% to 79%.

The increase, Mitra said, suggests that a short-term measurement like the inflation rate might not reflect the cumulative stress caused by rising prices. People’s belt-tightening measures can include canceling subscriptions, cutting back on utilities, delaying medical treatments, and working additional jobs, the study notes.

And even if the inflation rate drops, prices are still “a lot higher than what they were a couple of years ago,” she said. “The price of a gallon of milk is not what it used to be in 2020.”

Impact of Job Losses, Long COVID

Mitra also noted that stress due to inflation is worse for those whose income is cut, whether from a job loss or a case of long COVID-19. Among other findings, the study found stress levels increased more among certain groups, including less educated adults and women in general, for instance.

The study calls for policies to address “the complexity of stress responses” stemming from societal challenges like the pandemic and the inflation that followed it—a combination of problems seen “never before in the history of the U.S.,” the study says. The study also points to the need for adding inflation adjustments to government benefits and tax credits—such as the child tax credit—that promote people’s economic security, Mitra said.

She looks forward to future studies with her cross-disciplinary group, which includes researchers from the social work school at Rutgers, the Penn State Cancer Institute, the University of North Texas Health Science Center, West Virginia University’s department of dental public health, and JPS Health Network in Fort Worth. “We share an interest [in]the relation between economic insecurity and health,” she said.

That tech, called generative AI, holds the key to a new system “that not only anticipates potential attacks but also prepares systems to counteract previously unseen cyberthreats,” said Mohamed Rahouti, Ph.D., assistant professor in the computer and information science department and one of Fordham’s IBM research fellows.

He and a crew of graduate students are working on new systems that, he said, are needed to get ahead of sophisticated attacks that are constantly evolving. Their focus is a type of easy-to-launch attack that has proved crippling to companies and government agencies ever since the internet began.

Denial of Service Attacks

Cybercriminals sometimes overwhelm and freeze a company’s or government agency’s computer systems by bombarding them with way more internet traffic than they can handle, using multiple computers or multiple online accounts. This is known as a distributed denial of service attack, or DDOS.

A typical attack could cost a company $22,000 a minute, he said. Nearly 30,000 of them take place every day around the world. Many of them are foiled by programs that use machine learning and artificial intelligence.

But those programs don’t always know what to look for, since they typically rely on snapshots of past traffic, Rahouti said. Another challenge is the growing number of internet-connected devices, from smart watches to autonomous vehicles, that could provide cybercriminals with new avenues for attack.

Generative AI

Hence the research into using generative AI, which could produce a far wider range of possible attack scenarios by working upon computer traffic data to make new connections and predictions, he said. When it’s trained using the scenarios produced by generative AI, “then my machine learning/AI model will be much more capable of detecting the different types of DDOS attacks,” Rahouti said.

To realize this vision, Rahouti and his team of graduate students are working on several projects. They recently used generative AI and other techniques to expand upon a snapshot of network traffic data and create a clearer picture of what is and isn’t normal. This helps machine learning programs see what shouldn’t be there. “We were amazed at the quality of this enhanced picture,” Rahouti said.

This bigger dataset enabled their machine learning model to spot low-profile attacks it had previously missed, he said.

Large Language Models

For their next project, they’re studying a large language model—the kind that powers ChatGPT—for ideas about how generative AI can be applied to cybersecurity. They’re using InstructLab, an open-source tool launched by IBM and Red Hat in May.

With all the companies and university researchers invested in new uses for generative AI, Rahouti is optimistic about its future applications in cybersecurity. The goal is to develop a system that runs on its own in the background, detecting both existing and emerging threats without being explicitly told what to look for.

“At present, we don’t have a fully autonomous system with these capabilities,” Rahouti said, “but advancements in AI and machine learning are moving us closer to achieving this level of real-time, adaptive cybersecurity.”

Funded through a nearly $25,000 grant awarded to Dougnon by the Wenner-Gren Foundation in September 2023, the Water and Migration Project is a comprehensive ethnographic research program that analyzes the effects of post-drought migration patterns on housing, community, and livelihoods across three villages in Mali.

“Many scholars work on water and migration, but mostly as a future scenario, Dougnon said. “I’m looking at a group of people who really, collectively, left their region and settled in new places … this is concrete data.”

The Sahel region of western Africa, where Mali is located, suffered two notable periods of drought in 1973 and 1984. This devastated the local agrarian economy and displaced its inhabitants, leading to mass migration.

The project aims to collect data from those impacted communities through first-hand interviews, field observations, and archival records from entities such as local churches and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs).

Working for the Marginalized

When Dougnon reached out to organizations for data on these migratory communities, those institutions weren’t just willing to pitch in—they were eager.

Little information is available on the long-term effects of these droughts on mass migration, and researchers like Dougnon are working to fill a crucial gap that will hopefully lead to actionable relief efforts. Mali has continued to deal with droughts, affecting about 400,000 residents each year and reducing crop revenues by $9.5 million annually.

“I’m so proud that not only are the migrants interested in my research, but also the institutions,” Dougnon said. “The state and NGOs are interested in these results because …these [migrants] are facing challenges.”

For Dougnon, this human aspect is the key that has driven his work throughout his long career.

“All of my research has this humanitarian aspect—defending the marginalized,” Dougnon said.

Dougnon, who is currently on leave from Fordham to work on the project, has been conducting this research for the first six months of the grant. He will spend the remainder of the year compiling a report on his findings that he will present to the foundation, as well as to a workshop of Fordham community members studying comparable issues.

How Do Communities Adapt?

At Fordham, Dougnan teaches a variety of undergraduate and master’s level courses that combine his expertise in French with subjects like African society and the environment. An anthropologist by trade, Dougnon has been surveying the humanitarian effects of climate change, such as how natural resources get depleted and how that impacts internal migration, for more than 25 years.

Dougnon stressed that these small-scale examples of the effects of climate change—and how agricultural communities respond to them in real time—could provide key insights into managing potentially larger resource scarcity.

“My project wants to look at how they have been able to adapt to new places in the south of Mali,” he said. “How do they transform this landscape by bringing in technologies, social organizations, and so on?”

Dougnon hopes to use his findings to create a new, more robust project that can replicate these methods on a larger scale—ideally encompassing multiple countries in Africa.

BJHP is a Fordham research initiative that preserves the stories of the Jewish Bronx. The project originally began with Sophia Maier, FCRH ’23, who documented the stories of more than 75 members of the Jewish community who once called the Bronx their home. Now, in the months before Maier earns her master’s degree in teaching from the University this spring, she’s teaching a new group of undergraduates how to continue the project.

Oral History with a Professional Historian

About a dozen undergraduate and graduate students joined BJHP this semester, thanks to an Arts and Sciences Deans’ Faculty Challenge Grant. The students, who study subjects from economics to theology to history, are interested in BJHP for different reasons, said Daniel Soyer, Ph.D., BJHP director and history professor. Some are Jewish themselves, with family ties to the Bronx. Others are interested in Jewish studies and history.

During a recent training session, the students met Leyla Vural, a New York City-based oral historian. Vural, who has a master’s degree in oral history from Columbia University, has interviewed recipients of the Nobel Prize, scientists, artists, trade unionists, LGBTQ New Yorkers, and more. She spoke with the students about how to approach their interviews and navigate the ethics of their work. 

“What stuck with me most was when she talked about how the role of the interviewer was, above all, to listen,” Maier said.

Jews in the Bronx: An Important Part of NYC History

In another session, Soyer taught students about the history of the Jewish Bronx.

“The Bronx was once the most Jewish borough—almost half Jewish—and now it’s the least,” said Soyer. “Through [BJHP], we’re capturing an important part of Bronx, New York, and Jewish history that’s been understudied.” 

As part of their training, the students also learned from Maier about how to conduct interviews, using a 27-page guidebook developed by Maier herself. 

“I’m considering going for my Ph.D., so it’s great to get that experience, working with undergraduates,” said Maier, an aspiring history teacher who earned her bachelor’s degree in history from Fordham College at Rose Hill and is now part of the accelerated master’s degree program at the Graduate School of Education. 

This summer, Maier, Stovall, and Soyer will teach high schoolers about the history of Jews in New York in a weeklong course, part of Fordham’s annual summer programming. Their curriculum will include oral histories from BJHP, said Soyer.

Having a Cup of Tea and ‘Just Listening’

Being a part of BJHP means so much, said Maier, who teared up while speaking. 

“It’s changed the trajectory of my life. I love doing it, and I’ve met so many amazing people. … These people are predominantly elderly, and they really appreciate that some young person is taking an hour or two out of their day to sit down, have a cup of tea with them … and just listen,” said Maier, noting that the oldest person she has spoken with is 97. “To have their life stories recorded and made available [especially for their families]is a gift without value.”

This fall in Arizona, advocates used a research report from Alexander Meyer, a Fordham student in the international political economy and development graduate program, to get the state to change its policy around SNAP benefits for community college students.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, access to a food assistance benefit called SNAP—Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program—was expanded.

By analyzing data from the Arizona Department of Economic Security, Meyer found that during this time, there was at least a 22% increase in Arizona college students accessing this benefit.

“My primary research question was, is there a population of college students that is in need, but is cut off from accessing SNAP because of too-stringent eligibility requirements?” said Meyer, who is from Arizona.

“The answer to that question is there is indeed a large population of college students in need of SNAP.”

Expanding Access

Across the country, about one in five college students face food insecurity, according to data from the U.S. Department of Education.

In order to qualify for SNAP—outside of the pandemic emergency—applicants must meet federal income guidelines. In addition, “able-bodied” adults also have a work requirement, which can include everything from having a job to being in a career training program. Being a student in traditional colleges and universities, however, usually does not make them eligible, so many students can’t access the benefits unless they also work part time.

During the pandemic, that requirement changed and college students became eligible. But when the emergency declaration ended in the spring of 2023, those expanded benefits went away, leaving many college students facing food insecurity issues again, Meyer said.

In stepped the Arizona Food Bank Network, where Meyer once worked and still maintains connections. The organization advocated for college students, or at a minimum, community college students, to maintain their access to SNAP.

“Hunger and food insecurity on college campuses is a growing issue across the nation,” a memo from the Food Bank Network, which cited Meyer’s paper, read. “Increased food insecurity and decreased education levels can have detrimental and long-lasting effects not only to individuals but also to the health and economic well-being of communities as a whole.”

Their work, backed up by Meyer’s paper, helped convince Arizona’s Department of Economic Security to count community college as a career training program, which allows students at those schools to satisfy the work requirement.

Next Steps

For Andrew Simons, Ph.D., associate professor of economics, seeing his student’s work—which started in his applied econometrics course last fall—be used to change state policy is a huge achievement.

“Some part of me wants to say this is the goal, but this is far exceeding the expectation,” he said. “You always want your research to be influencing the world.”

Simons and Meyer are doing a bit more analysis and work on the paper with a goal of getting it officially published in an academic journal. They’re also continuing the research, with a plan to look at the next set of data from 2023.

“We can analyze what that drop-off looks like and use that to further bolster our findings, saying, ‘You allowed this temporary exemption to allow more students to qualify for SNAP. Participation went up, and then you took it away, and participation went back down,’” Meyer said.

Meyer said he’s proud that his work had an impact, and that he hopes his research can be used to expand eligibility for all college students in Arizona and support similar policy changes in other states.

“Frankly it’s a dream—who doesn’t want to contribute via their research to expanding policy that in a very real way will touch tens of thousands of college students, making sure they have food to eat, and via that food, that they can thrive in their studies,” Meyer said.

At Fordham, students can participate in the meal swipe donation program, where students with extra meal swipes can donate them and students who are facing food insecurity issues can access additional meal swipes through campus ministry. In addition, students facing food insecurity-related challenges can reach out to staff in student affairs, campus ministry, financial aid, or their dean’s office for additional resources.

As a research assistant, one of the main things he’s working on is lineage tracing, which allows researchers to follow individual cells to better understand biological processes. He’s been using cellular barcoding, a technique that allows researchers to label and track individual cells, to study blood development in cells.

“A lot of the research I’ve done here has informed my next steps,” says Perez, who is applying to M.D.-Ph.D. programs. “I really fell in love with all the lineage-tracing work.”

Using Philosophy in Science

Perez says conducting research with Ipsita Banerjee, Ph.D., chair of the Fordham chemistry department, and publishing their work in academic journals, set him up well for his current role at Harvard. One of his Fordham projects involved the use of 3D bioprinting to try to inspire nerve growth and help people with spinal cord injuries.

He says that he was always interested in neuroscience, even when he was a student in high school in Florida, which is part of why he chose Fordham. “I went to a couple of summer camps that really solidified that, and now I think I’m going into anti-aging and longevity research—I think that’s going to be one of my passions as I move through.”

Perez also feels he benefited from the interdisciplinary training he received at Fordham, where he minored in both biochemistry and philosophy.

“I took a scientific realism course, and now, when I’m talking to my advisor here, we’ll ask questions like, ‘Is this picture of what we’re seeing true? Is it useful? Is it just a data error?’ All of this, at the end of the day, is philosophy,” he says with a laugh. “I’m doing that philosophy, I’m doing the computational work, and it’s all such a blend.”

From Swimming to Tightrope Walking

At Fordham, Perez also was a Division I athlete on the diving team, where he took home first place in the one-meter dive his senior year. One of his standout memories from Fordham was a summer training trip to China with his diving coach.

“It was one of the greatest experiences I got to have at Fordham,” he says. “I got to train with the Olympic national team there.”

He says he still draws on his athletic training, even if he’s no longer competing.

“Health and fitness is pivotal for my mental work,” he says. “I’m still trying to incorporate a lot of acrobatics. I’ve taken up tightrope walking, and we also do highlining with a harness. I find stuff like that to be essential to keep me sane.”

Perez says that after his graduate programs are finished, he wants to continue working in research.

“I want to become head of my own lab, doing some sort of clinical research, maybe working with a biotech startup that can help me move forward with this field of regenerative research,” he says.

Read more “20 in Their 20s” profiles.

One day, while scrolling through a Facebook group for car enthusiasts, he had an idea. “I sent a message saying, ‘I’m an engineering major, and I’m looking to do some design work. Does anyone have any parts they would like to be designed?’” he recalls. Soon, “there were 30 people [direct messaging]me with dimensions and different projects that they needed to be completed.”

The experience he gained helped him land internships with Standard Motor Products and Psionic, an aerospace and defense company, where he “fell in love with startups” and got “really, really interested in rockets,” he says. That inspired him to create the Fordham Rocket Propulsion Lab, a club that allows students to learn more about rockets and aerospace. And with a few friends, he launched Ensemble Propulsion Systems, a passion project to “design, build, and test hybrid and liquid rocket motors.”

In his senior year, Adipietro began applying for jobs, including one at SpaceX, a spacecraft engineering company. The hiring process was intense, he says.

“Every single person from the team interviews you for 30 minutes and by the end of that, it was like the whole room is filled up with equations, but it’s all equations that I learned here at Fordham.”

He got the job as an integration and test engineer and started at SpaceX soon after graduating from Fordham College at Rose Hill in May. He believes his passion for engineering helped him stand out from other applicants.

“Say there’s one person who wants to get a job for the money, then there is one person who is thinking about the industry from the second they open their eyes in the morning. The latter will have a higher chance of getting the job,” he says, adding: “Pursue your passion.”

Read more “20 in Their 20s” profiles.

With help from recent graduate Beatriz Goncalves, FCRH ’23, and her mentor Professor Ipsita Banerjee, Ph.D., Phan looked into how specific peptides—strings of amino acids—could potentially mitigate an enzyme that contributes to ALS from “misfolding,” or failing to function properly.

The goal of the project was to design new peptide-based drug molecules on a nanoscale level that would limit that misfolding so that it wouldn’t disrupt the other proteins from working properly within and outside the cells, according to Goncalves and Banerjee. Goncalves and Phan showed that the molecules that they developed were able to reduce oxidative stress in cells, and that some of the molecules could mitigate misfolding over time.

“The results have been exciting,” Goncalves said.

Phan and Goncalves were just two of the students who spent the summer conducting research in Banerjee’s lab in John Mulcahy Hall at Rose Hill.

Banerjee, the chair of the chemistry department and program director of Biochemistry, said her students have been working on drug delivery systems, particularly those that target tumors and cancerous cells, and developing new biomaterials for tissue engineering as well as targeting protein misfolding in neurodegenerative diseases.

In the lab, the students have access to a variety of scientific equipment, such as a 3D bioprinter, which allows them to replicate tissue growth and investigate these tissue models for their research.

“My biggest passion at Fordham is working with students in the research lab, and preparing them to become next-generation scientists,” Banerjee said, adding that she mentors students throughout the year, both in the lab and in her classes.

From the Lab to a Ph.D.

For Goncalves, who was a biology major and biochemistry minor, the experience in Banerjee’s lab helped her get accepted into numerous Ph.D. programs. She chose to pursue her Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania, going for cell and molecular biology where she will work on immunotherapeutic research for targeting cancer.

“I’m an undergraduate student who had the experience and who has the resume to be able to go straight into a Ph.D. That’s an opportunity that was offered to me at Fordham that I probably would not have had at other schools,” she said. “I would probably have to take a gap year or do something else like a master’s in order to have the resumé I have now.”

Goncalves published at least five research papers with Banerjee at Fordham, including a few where she was the first author on the project. She and Molly Murray, FCRH ’23, who majored in chemistry and psychology, said that they spent 10-12 hour days in the lab in summer 2022 and during the school year working on a variety of projects, such as developing ways to deliver drugs into glioblastoma tumor cells as well as developing new peptide based drug molecules for targeting breast tumor cells. The pair also spent this past summer in the lab wrapping up their research projects.

“Beatriz and I last summer, we probably spent about 80 hours a week here,” Murray said. “There were a lot of times where we were here past midnight, but I feel like we’re both very well prepared for going into Ph.D. [programs] and that kind of time commitment.”

Murray, who was also accepted to several programs and will start a Ph.D. in chemistry at the University of North Carolina next fall, said that before working in Banerjee’s lab she had minimal lab experience.

“I think she definitely challenges us a lot—especially when you’re first coming into the lab, there’s a ton of stuff to learn right off the bat,” she said. “We’re a lab that helps each other out a lot, but there’s also that part of it that you have to investigate by yourself, so having that push is definitely helpful.”

Research on Cancer, Aging, and More

Many students working in the lab over the summer were focusing on drug or treatment delivery systems that could target cancer cells. Murray focused on ovarian cancer, while Amrita Das, a sophomore biology major, started a research project investigating lung cancer.

“I plan on going to med school,” Das said, “so I wanted to get exposed to a research lab setting to get experience.”

Sophomore Aigerim Mukhit’s summer research focused on skin regeneration and aging, particularly around cells called fibroblasts.

The goal of her research was to investigate the impact of peptide conjugates on aged fibroblasts to examine if they enhance can express characteristic proteins, which are indicative of regeneration.

“I just want to contribute to biomedical research—I want to study aging, not only skin aging, but overall aging,” she said.

“They get the summer to actually focus on their research, instead of having classes or jobs or other things going on,” explained Christopher Aubin, Ph.D., Fordham College at Rose Hill faculty director for undergraduate research. “And they get to interact with other students outside of their disciplines, in a way where they’re watching each other generate knowledge.”

Students in the program worked closely with faculty to pursue topics that they find interesting.

“Everyone was very very helpful, and there were workshops if you didn’t know what you were doing, or if you needed help,” said Diana Paradise, a rising junior who worked on a psychology research project this summer. “It was a really great experience. I wouldn’t have been able to find what I found or learn what I learned without this program.”

Maura B. Mast, Ph.D., dean of Fordham College at Rose Hill, attended the presentations, and spoke to the students on day two.

“This program is amazing. I’m so excited that you all get to learn from each other and that we get to learn from you,” Mast said. “And I’m really grateful for [our donors’]  support. We are able to fund this because we get amazing support from our alumni; they’re the ones who gave the money so that you could have this incredible experience.”

Hear from four of our summer scholars in in this video series, including the video below:

“Our body essentially is like a laboratory—you have chemical reactions going on 24/7,” said Ipsita Banerjee, Ph.D., chair of the chemistry department and professor of chemistry. “Biochemistry is essentially a study of what reactions are going on in your body; how do we actually stay alive?”

Banerjee said that after she became chair of the chemistry department in 2018, she and a team of faculty members from the biology and chemistry departments worked to develop the minor in biochemistry, which was launched in 2020.

After the COVID-19 pandemic, she worked on developing the major with a team of chemistry faculty members, who developed new courses for the Biochemistry major. The major was approved by the New York State Department of Education this summer.

The major will be open to all students starting this fall. For now, incoming first-year students who are interested in the major will come in as undeclared, though they can still begin to take classes toward it. Beginning next fall, first-year students will be able to enter as biochemistry majors.

Preparation for Biotech, Medical Industries

Banerjee said that biochemistry studies will help prepare students for the expanding biotech industry, which has seen massive growth post-COVID.

“There are so many diseases today that we still don’t have a cure for—Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, cancer, to name a few,” she said. “While there has been progress made, much more needs to be done to understand how these diseases work, you really have to understand how things work at the molecular level—that’s what biochemistry does.”

Banerjee said that the degree will also help prepare students for graduate and medical school as well as careers in areas such as biochemistry, forensic science, pharmacology, biomedical engineering, biomedical sciences, and other health-related fields.

She noted that there’s been a real interest from students in this type of major.

“Many of the STEM students are interested in a career in medicine, allied health fields, or health professions, so biochemistry essentially ties into that,” Banerjee said.

Hands-On Learning in Biochemistry

The major has an interdisciplinary focus, according to Banerjee, as it integrates lessons from both biology and chemistry and adds new courses to broaden students’ exposure to the subject. This allows students to “approach it in a way that is interesting to [them].”

There are two tracks within the major—an American Chemical Society (ACS) certified track and a general track. Students who are interested in chemistry and advanced structural and molecular aspects of biochemistry may choose the ACS track, while students who are inclined more toward cell, molecular, and structural aspects of biochemistry and physiological approaches may pursue the general track.

Students will start by taking introductory STEM courses in biology, chemistry, physics, and calculus to lay the foundation for their work, she said.

“The upper-level courses are where they can really start immersing themselves,” she said. Those include Molecular Biology, Physical and Computational Models of Biochemical Systems, Biochemistry I and II, Methods of Biochemical Research, and more.

Research Opportunities

Biochemistry majors can also work to join research laboratories, such as Banerjee’s and those of other faculty members who are doing chemical biology, biophysical, and cell and molecular biology-related research.

This gives students opportunities to gain hands-on experience and potentially publish their work in peer-reviewed scientific journals, Banerjee said, as students will be engaged in challenging research projects and feel an ownership toward their projects.

“My biggest passion at Fordham is working with students in the research lab, and preparing them to become next-generation scientists,” Banerjee said. “Research is a big part of our department as a whole, so students will have ample opportunities to do research with the mentor of their choice.”

STEM Partnerships in NYC

Banerjee said that she believes this major will help elevate the University’s connections to growing STEM industries.

“I think one of the things we’re really trying to do, given the location of Fordham being in New York, is expand into the biotech industry, have partnerships with the larger community within New York as well as the suburbs, Westchester, all those areas,” she said. “I think by having this biochemistry major it will also provide, in addition to working with faculty mentors here, internship opportunities for students.”